Related papers: Adversarial procurement in blockchains
Cryptocurrencies, based on and led by Bitcoin, have shown promise as infrastructure for pseudonymous online payments, cheap remittance, trustless digital asset exchange, and smart contracts. However, Bitcoin-derived blockchain protocols…
Over the past decade, blockchain technology has attracted a huge attention from both industry and academia because it can be integrated with a large number of everyday applications of modern information and communication technologies (ICT).…
Blockchain protocols differ in fundamental ways, including the mechanics of selecting users to produce blocks (e.g., proof-of-work vs. proof-of-stake) and the method to establish consensus (e.g., longest chain rules vs. Byzantine…
Payment channels are the most prominent solution to the blockchain scalability problem. We introduce the problem of network design with fees for payment channels from the perspective of a Payment Service Provider (PSP). Given a set of…
There exist many forms of Blockchain finality conditions, from deterministic to probabilistic terminations. To favor availability against consistency in the face of partitions, most blockchains only offer probabilistic eventual finality:…
Smart contracts provide the means to stipulate rules of interaction between mutually distrustful organizations. They encode contractual agreements on the basis of source code, which else need to be contractualized in natural language. While…
Given the parallels between game theory and consensus, it makes sense to intelligently design blockchain or DAG protocols with an incentive-compatible-first mentality. To that end, we propose a new blockchain or DAG protocol enhancement…
We develop a model of coordination and allocation of decentralized multi-sided markets, in which our theoretical analysis is promisingly optimizing the decentralized transaction packaging process at high-throughput blockchains or Web 3.0…
As restaking protocols gain adoption across blockchain ecosystems, there is a need for Actively Validated Services (AVSs) to span multiple Shared Security Providers (SSPs). This leads to stake fragmentation which introduces new…
Blockchains with smart contracts are distributed ledger systems that achieve block-state consistency among distributed nodes by only allowing deterministic operations of smart contracts. However, the power of smart contracts is enabled by…
Permissioned blockchain systems promise to provide both decentralized trust and privacy. Hyperledger Fabric is currently one of the most wide-spread permissioned blockchain systems and is heavily promoted both in industry and academia. Due…
Payment channel networks (PCNs) are a promising approach to making cryptocurrency transactions faster and more scalable. At their core, PCNs bypass the blockchain by routing transactions through intermediary channels. However, a channel can…
We argue that the current POW based consensus algorithm of the Bitcoin network suffers from a fundamental economic discrepancy between the real world transaction (txn) costs incurred by miners and the wealth that is being transacted. Put…
In the paper, we present designs for multiple blockchain consensus primitives and a novel blockchain system, all based on the use of trusted execution environments (TEEs), such as Intel SGX-enabled CPUs. First, we show how using TEEs for…
In this paper, we present a pricing mechanism that aligns incentives of agents who exchange resources on a decentralized ledger with the goal of maximizing transaction throughput. Subdividing a blockchain ledger into shards promises to…
A blockchain replaces central counterparties with time-consuming consensus protocols to record the transfer of ownership. This settlement latency slows cross-exchange trading, exposing arbitrageurs to price risk. Off-chain settlement,…
Recent advances in the blockchain research have been made in two important directions. One is refined resilience analysis utilizing game theory to study the consequences of selfish behaviors of users (miners), and the other is the extension…
Proof of Stake (PoS) is a burgeoning Sybil resistance mechanism that aims to have a digital asset ("token") serve as security collateral in crypto networks. However, PoS has so far eluded a comprehensive threat model that encompasses both…
Blockchains have block-size limits to ensure the entire cluster can keep up with the tip of the chain. These block-size limits are usually single-dimensional, but richer multidimensional constraints allow for greater throughput. The…
Since the inception of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology have attracted an increasing interest from both academia and industry. Among various core components, consensus protocol is the defining technology…